Bill Bryson
I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.Collection: Dad
An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.Collection: Space
There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.Collection: Time
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.Collection: Good
Science has been quite embattled. It's the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.Collection: Science
You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.Collection: Science
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.Collection: Age
There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.Collection: Home
I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.Collection: Time
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again.Collection: Home
I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.
In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'
My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.
Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.
I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.
I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.
I grew up, really, in the days before air conditioning. So I can remember what it was like to be really hot, for instance, and I can remember what it was like when your barber shop and your local stores weren't air conditioned, so it was hot when you went in them and they propped the doors open.
I'm a great believer that you had to do everything you've done to have got to where you are.
Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls.
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me.
I could give you a long list of things I like about Britain, but essentially what it comes down to is that I feel about Britain the same way I feel about my wife. I'm crazy about my wife - we just kind of suit each other. I wouldn't say that she's the most fantastic human being that's ever lived, but she is for me.
I sometimes think I cannot write another passage about a disappointing meal ever again, because I've done it so many times.
You don't have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he's just this magnificent human being. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.
Cheapness is a great virtue.
I've never quite understood that feeling: that you arrive in a strange place, yet you want to have nothing but familiar experiences.
I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn't look it, but somehow when you get out there it's really steep and hard.
If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way.
In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.'
Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It's so bad that you think he's going to announce in a minute that it's all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady.
A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.
The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.
I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.
I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.
In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism.
If you go out on the Appalachian Trail, you have to bring so much more equipment - a tent, sleeping bag - but if you go hiking in England, or Europe, generally, towns and villages are near enough together at the end of the day you can always go to a nice little inn and have a hot bath and something to drink.
I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.
The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me; it's anybody who's funny.